When Family-Friendly Policies Backfire

In Chile, a law requires employers to provide working mothers with child care. One result? Women are paid less.

In Spain, a policy to give parents of young children the right to work part-time has led to a decline in full-time, stable jobs available to all women — even those who are not mothers.

Elsewhere in Europe, generous maternity leaves have meant that women are much less likely than men to become managers or achieve other high-powered positions at work.

Family-friendly policies can help parents balance jobs and responsibilities at home, and go a long way toward making it possible for women with children to remain in the work force. But these policies often have unintended consequences.

They can end up discouraging employers from hiring women in the first place, because they fear women will leave for long periods or use expensive benefits. “For employers, it becomes much easier to justify discrimination,” said Sarah Jane Glynn, director of women’s economic policy at the Center for American Progress.

Unlike many countries, the United States has few federal policies for working parents. One is the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, which provides workers at companies of a certain size with 12 weeks of unpaid leave.

Women are 5 percent more likely to remain employed but 8 percent less likely to get promotions than they were before it became law, according to an unpublished new study by Mallika Thomas, who will be an assistant professor of economics at Cornell University. She attributed this partly to companies that don’t take a chance on investing in the careers of women who might leave. “The problem ends up being that all women, even those who do not anticipate having children or cutting back in hours, may be penalized,” she said.

As Americans debate whether and how to make the system here more generous, there are lessons from overseas. The child-care law in Chile, the most recent version of which went into effect in 2009, was intended to increase the percentage of women who work, which is below 50 percent, among the lowest rates in Latin America. It requires that companies with 20 or more female workers provide and pay for child care for women with children under 2, in a location nearby where the women can go to feed them.

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CreditAnna Parini

It eases the transition back to work and helps children’s development, said María F. Prada, an economist at the Inter-American Development Bank and lead author of a new study on the effects of the law. But it has also led to a decline in women’s starting salaries of between 9 percent and 20 percent. Researchers compared pay at the same companies before and after they were big enough to be forced to comply with the law. (Another approach by companies, especially smaller ones, has been simply not to comply with the law.)

“That was thought to be a provision to help them participate in the labor force and achieve more work-family balance, and it’s doing the opposite,” said Ms. Prada, whose study was published last month by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Spain passed a law in 1999 giving workers with children younger than 7 the right to ask for reduced hours without fear of being laid off. Those who took advantage of it were nearly all women.

Over the next decade, companies were 6 percent less likely to hire women of childbearing age compared with men, 37 percent less likely to promote them and 45 percent more likely to dismiss them, according to a study by Daniel Fernández-Kranz, an economist at IE Business School in Madrid, and Núria Rodríguez-Planas, an economist at City University of New York, Queens College. The probability of women of childbearing age not being employed climbed 20 percent. Another result: Women were more likely to be in less stable, short-term contract jobs, which are not required to provide such benefits.

“One of the unintended consequences of the law has been to push women into the lower segment of the labor market with bad-quality, unprotected jobs where their rights cannot be enforced,” Mr. Fernández-Kranz said.

These findings are consistent with previous research by Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn, economists at Cornell. In a study of 22 countries, they found that generous family-friendly policies like long maternity leaves and part-time work protections in Europe made it possible for more women to work — but that they were more likely to be in dead-end jobs and less likely to be managers.

There is no simple way to prevent family-friendly policies from backfiring, researchers say. One idea is to make sure that employers do not have to finance them. As in Chile, they will often pass the burden to employees. The three American states — California, New Jersey and Rhode Island — that offer paid family leave finance it through employee payroll taxes, for example.

Another suggestion is to make sure policies are generous but not too generous. Some say that more than three months of maternity leave is helpful, but that more than nine months begins to hurt women’s career prospects.

Perhaps the most successful way to devise policies that help working families but avoid unintended consequences, people who study the issue say, is to make them gender neutral. In places like Sweden and Quebec, for instance, parental leave policies encourage both men and women to take time off for a new baby.

“It has to become something that humans do,” Ms. Glynn, from the Center for American Progress, said, “as opposed to something that women do.”

Correction:June 12, 2015

An article on May 26 about the unintended consequences of policies created to help working parents omitted an author of a study about a Spanish law’s effect on working parents. Daniel Fernández-Kranz and Núria Rodríguez-Planas were co-authors. Mr. Fernández-Kranz was not the sole author and did not lead the study.